Skip to footer

Mona Lisa rides laser beams all the way to the moon: NASA

NASA scientists say they have succeeded in beaming an image of the Mona Lisa, the iconic painting by Leonardo da Vinci, all the way up to the moon. 

|
Xiaoli Sun/NASA Goddard
It's moonward for the Mona Lisa.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Sometime in the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci painted his Mona Lisa, a work that has been called "the most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world." More than 500 years later, and the Mona Lisa can add a new superlative to her resume: a trip to the moon. 

In a new paper published this week, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, said they were were able to use lasers to send an image of da Vinci's painting all the way up to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, an unmanned spacecraft currently circling the moon. Later, the image was returned to earth by a radio telemetry system. 

"This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances," said David Smith, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter's principal investigator, in a press statement. "In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use. In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide."

At Goddard, scientists split the image of the Mona Lisa into an array of 152 pixels by 200 pixels. "Every pixel was converted into a shade of gray," NASA explained, "represented by a number between zero and 4,095. Each pixel was transmitted by a laser pulse, with the pulse being fired in one of 4,096 possible time slots during a brief time window allotted for laser tracking." NASA says the image was eventually transmitted to LRO at 300 bits per second. 

So hey, why did the NASA Goddard researchers choose the Mona Lisa for its experiment and not, say, an image of Pat Patriot? Well, according to Goddard's Xiaoli Sun, the principal author of the paper, it all comes down to the iconic nature of the painting. "[The Mona Lisa] is a familiar image with lots of subtlety," Sun told NBC. "You can immediately feel whether the image looks right, and how much information got lost."

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter: @CSMHorizonsBlog

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Mona Lisa rides laser beams all the way to the moon: NASA
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0118/Mona-Lisa-rides-laser-beams-all-the-way-to-the-moon-NASA
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe